On the morning that Spotify Wrapped dropped, I saw people on social media bragging to their friends about being in the top 0.01% of Charli XCX listeners, listening to more “Permanent Wave Shoegaze” than anyone else, and how much “Mallgoth Rock Out Emo” made it into their data recap of the year. And yet, knowing how Spotify has destroyed the music landscape, it all felt wrong.
Spotify is one of the most popular ways to consume music today with over 640 million users but it remains fraught with controversy. The streaming service utilizes an inequitable method of paying artists, has contributed to the monopolization of audio consumption and has prioritized listening based on playlists generated by algorithms and AI. All of this devalues the communal art form of music and eradicates the emotional depth with which we listen. In order to support the future of music and the people who make it, we must move away from Spotify.
Spotify makes payments to artists through their labels and rights holders but distributes those payments based on a process called streamshare. Through this process, subscription dollars are pooled by the streaming service and allocated to rights holders based on the number of times music owned by that rights holder was streamed.
Artists in opposition to the way Spotify and other streaming services operate founded the United Musicians and Allied Workers organization in 2020. This organization strives for a music industry that pays artists fairly for their labor and fights for greater equity amongst musicians. The union organized global protests at Spotify offices in 2021 as part of their Justice at Spotify campaign, which cites such demands as payment of at least one cent per stream and establishing a user-centric payment model.
Liz Pelly, a journalist who has written for publications such as The Baffler, The Guardian, and NPR, has been writing about Spotify since the 2010s. On Jan. 7, 2025, she will publish her book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. ” The book consists of research Pelly has conducted that showcases a cultural criticism of streaming and digital music today and the impacts of streaming on both the listener and the artist.
One of Pelly’s focuses is the concept of the Spotify playlist and how, over time, this has shifted towards algorithmic and AI-generated playlists in the quest for what the company deems a “perfect playlist.”
“A lot of the book looks at how such a big part of Spotify’s strategy for growth involved bringing in playlist curators, raising different algorithmic recommendations; this sort of shift from just being a place on the internet where you could access the so-called entire history of recorded music to becoming a platform that was really about knowing your taste better than you know it yourself,” Pelly said.
The data-driven approach to listening, culminating with Wrapped, discourages an emotional connection with music. The playlist-centric approach caters to what the music industry refers to as the “lean-back listener” who seeks out background, inoffensive music.
“There’s so many different ways to listen to music but in order to create the most engagement, the most frictionless experience, there has really been this one mode of listening that has really been championed, which is making it as easy as possible for people to just shoot music in the background all day, not change it,” she said.
In December 2023, Spotify announced it would lay off 17% of its workforce. This came soon after Spotify announced expansions of its AI programming and it has been inferred that the two are related. This shift towards AI programming has only further cemented the mechanical approach towards listening habits.
While these changes by Spotify work for some artists, it has other impacts on music that do not lend well to smaller independent artists. Most artistically driven musicians do not create music to be consumed in singular snippets or shortened clips for TikTok. The music that interests me is emotionally charged and requires care and attention when consuming it but those artists are pushed out of the spotlight by easily palatable snippets.
Of course, it makes sense why streaming services like Spotify are so popular. They provide access to a vast amount of the world’s music library at the press of a button. Playlists like the Daily Mix provide personalized recommendations and make music consumption tailored for you easier than ever. However, all of this removes the social aspect of music discovery that can make it so meaningful. It’s easier than ever to find a new band or song that you enjoy without asking a friend for a recommendation but does that really make our listening experience better?
In order to change the trajectory in which the music industry is heading, listeners need to change the way they consume music. Bandcamp is a website through which you can purchase digital downloads and physical media, and the majority of the share goes to the artist. Physical media like vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs are all still in production and can be bought from local record stores. The bonus of this is the communal aspect of musical listening, in which you can talk to clerks and other customers and get human recommendations on what to listen to.
While streaming has shifted the music landscape in an extraordinarily bleak way, the music industry has changed before and will change again. The people who care about art must take it upon themselves to center art and not the billionaires and companies that profit off of it. From whence Spotify came, to where Spotify will return.
